In industry today fiber glass manufacture involves the drawing of glass fibers from a suitable molten glass source commonly called a bushing. The bushing is typically heated to maintain molten glass fed thereto from the forehearth of a glass furnace at the desired glass temperature. In some instances the bushing is used as the melter itself and in those operations, glass marbles are fed to the bushing and melted therein. Typical of two types of marble melt bushings employed are the bushings shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,300,288 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,104,761.
The fibers or filaments drawn from the modern bushings are wound at extremely high speeds. The winding of strands containing large number of filaments now drawn from bushings, 200 to 2,000 filaments being typical in a strand, and at drawing speeds of 1,500 to 20,000 feet per minute (457.2 meters to 6,096 meters per minute) or more has caused some difficulty in handling the packages of strand so formed. These packages, called forming packages in the art, contain strand which has considerable tension applied to it as it is wound. Since glass fibers are nearly perfectly elastic, the high tension in winding introduces high compressive forces on the forming tube on which the glass fibers are collected on the winder. These forces tend to wrinkle or crease the packages when they are removed from the winder often creating flat spots on the strand. In addition, the compressive forces render it difficult to remove packages from the winder. Further, the strands as wound in conventional practices tend to have a flat appearance with the filaments appearing to be spread in lateral direction. These qualities of strand render it difficult to process strand from forming packages in a textile operation for example and thus it is typical to remove glass strands from such forming packages and subject them to a twist frame operation where the strand is twisted and wound on a bobbin for ultimate customer use.